subject: The New Age of Telemarketing, Part 4 [print this page] The New Age of Telemarketing, Part 4 The New Age of Telemarketing, Part 4
Welcome back to our ongoing series on the evolution of telemarketing in today's business. In our previous articles, we touched on changing your approach to lead generation and the sales cycle by utilizing targeted data in order to cut the inefficiency from your process. Today, we are going to examine the most advanced form of evolved telemarketing, which is outsourcing your lead generation entirely to specialized transfer companies.
Outsourcing has been through its own evolution over the past decade. While the concept has existed for quite some time, the furor over outsourcing has caused many companies to re-evaluate their stance on cutting costs in order to maintain a certain standard of quality. Many managers are still under the impression that originating the entire cycle in-house often leads to higher overall quality, which theoretically translates into higher conversion and retention rates. The general perception is that outsourced prospects are typically screened poorly, causing more problems for your sales force than solving.
But the outsourced companies of today are no longer the same as the ones during the earlier part of the decade. No longer are they fraught with issues and staffed with employees who do not understand your product. Today, outsourced lead generation is considered the industry standard for most companies, and there is an entire market for such businesses. It makes sense from an economical standpoint: the more your sales force closes, the more revenue they bring in, therefore, providing them with a rich pipeline full of likely closes is more productive than making them work harder or hiring more bodies in chairs for numbers.
Let's say that your business has expanded to the point where even targeted data no longer fits your needs. At this time, you do not want your agents to even be speaking with merely qualified prospects, but actually interested potential clients. You want to streamline your sales cycle down to the final step only in order to maximize your numbers in terms of potential leads versus closed ones. The best way to accomplish this is the live transfer.
A live transfer is simple in concept, yet tremendous in terms of the potential it offers your business. All of the menial labor is done for you in a live transfer; the outsourced company makes all necessary contact, screens out the uninterested and the hostile, then qualifies the remaining prospects. Only the cream of the crop is left for your team, and while there may be a few that slip through the cracks, the vast majority of the busywork is removed from the process.
Imagine the possibilities that live transfers can bring to your business. Targeted leads still require time to establish contact, and there are many factors that still impede the sales cycle even with pre-qualified customers. Prospects can be too busy to speak with your agent, causing duplication of work through callbacks. They can also be qualified but not interested at this exact moment, or be caught at a bad time where they cannot make a decision immediately. There are many factors that can come into play, but all of them are eliminated through the live transfer.
A live transfer delivers a prospect to you immediately; the client is interested, qualified, and is ready to hear more. At this point, almost all of the potential pushback is eliminated from the equation, leaving your sales agent as the primary factor in whether the prospect will close or not. Companies that deal only or primarily with live transfers are statistically guaranteed to be more profitable than those who do not, despite the overhead involved with live transfers, simply because they can manage to grow their business past the point where the expenditure is a concern.
Of course, a live transfer does not solve every issue with your profit margin. It is not a replacement for talented sales people; rather, it means that your sales people must be of even higher calibre since they will be regularly working in the final phase, instead of devoting the majority of their time in the introductory stages. Without a strong sales force, you will not be any closer to increasing your sales than you were before, and will be spending significantly more money on your marketing. This is a dangerous trap to fall into, so before you get started on live transfers, you must ensure that your company is properly equipped to handle it.
We are nearing the end of this series, so stay tuned for the fine details of a live transfer in the next article. In the meantime, please visit our site at www.500marketing.com for more articles and ideas on how to grow your business with us.
